Discovering system performance problems late in the hardware development hardware can be catastrophic to project schedules and product competitiveness. Thus, accurate performance analysis must be completed earlier in the design cycle before the hardware specifications are finalized. In order to test performance of hardware, such as a system on chip (SoC), software is typically executed on a prototype model of the hardware. However, difficulties arise when the software has not yet been developed for the hardware being tested. The problem can be solved by creating workload models of the software.
Creation of these workload models often requires very good understanding of the target software application, as well as the target platform. In many cases, either or both of them may not be available due to several reasons, like legacy software code, complex software applications, and complex hardware platform.